Ministry of Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba has revealed that some schools across the country could be merged or deregistered following an ongoing verification exercise that has exposed institutions operating far below optimal capacity.
Speaking in front of the Senate on Wednesday, CS Ogamba disclosed that the government is collecting comprehensive data on student enrollment and the operational status of all institutions to inform a new policy on school rationalization.
"This is the information that now will be able to give us data to enable the government make a policy on whether some of those schools have got any basis to remain registered, whether we'll move some of those students from one school to another so that we can have institutions that are optimal in terms of having the right number of teachers and the right number of students," Ogamba explained.
The Cabinet Secretary painted a concerning picture of the current state of affairs, revealing that some registered schools have shockingly low enrollment numbers that make them economically unviable.
"Some of the schools that we have have less than 10 students. You have a school with less than 10 students, maybe with five teachers, so it is not optimal," he stated.
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According to Ogamba, the ministry previously registered schools based solely on whether applicants met basic criteria, without conducting regular audits to assess their continued viability.
"Applications used to come to the ministry because there is a school that needs to be registered. And if it met the criteria, then the registration was done. But over time, we've noticed that some of those institutions and the statistics we're getting is that some of our schools have less than 10 students," he said.
The verification exercise, which collects information on student numbers and institutional conditions, will provide the government with the data needed to determine which schools should remain operational, which should be merged with others, and which might need to be separated.
"We are doing this verification exercise to allow us to interrogate the things or the schools that we have, the institutions that we have, whether some of them will remain or they'll be merged and some will be separated," the CS noted.
The announcement comes amid a wider scandal in the education sector. The ministry has already uncovered over 50,000 ghost students during the same verification process.
Basic Education Principal Secretary Julius Bitok recently told the National Assembly Education Committee that the phantom learners were discovered in just half of the institutions audited, with the problem being most rampant in secondary schools.
The ghost students scandal has raised questions about how government capitation funds have been disbursed. Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna calculated that the country may have lost close to one billion shillings in a single financial year to the fraudulent scheme.
